Ars Technicast, Episode 14: Why the Microsoft Surface misses the mark

Sold to the public as the ideal Windows 8 device, the tablet isn't quite that.

This week, Microsoft Editor Peter Bright shares his honest opinions on what the Microsoft Surface lacks. The Surface has some small details that don’t merit full complaints, but there are a few big problems with it as well. Still, a lot can be said for Microsoft’s bold new tablet. To find out what went right and wrong, join Peter, Senior Apple Editor Jacqui Cheng, Social Editor Cesar Torres, and Ars Contributor Casey Johnston on this episode of the Ars Technicast.

What are your opinions about the Surface tablet? Do you agree or disagree with the observations you heard on the Ars Technicast? Share your thoughts with us below. Also, if you’re an iTunes subscriber, leave us a review and tell us how you like the show.

I get the 3G/4G because then MS would have had to parner up with a carrier and then they'd lose some of the control over the design of the device. But GPS is just a cheap little chip! And high res screens are being cranked out by Samsung et. al. by the millions. How hard would it have been to include a 1920 screen?

It's not that I don't agree, I've never used the Surface and am interested in the reviews but it feels like a very unprepared talk. Like he's pulling it from memory with no notes. It makes for broken flow and something that's quite hard to listen to.

Base model surface owner here. My main complaints are mainly around it not being what I thought it was. Like it is great and all looking at each part by itself, but I am already finding that the novelty has worn off and I am finding myself back to using an iPad for my tablet usage, and back to my laptop for other usage.

In the end the surface is more a laptop with a detachable keyboard than a tablet in the modern sense of tablets. I use tablets mainly on the couch leaning back relaxing, or standing on a packed train. I find my surface is just not as comfortable like this. It feels way heavier than any of my other tablets and the sharp back ridge digs into my hand. The metro experience also has far to much desktop leaking into it that it overall has never felt quite right using it touch only.

When I do have a table, I find myself going to may laptop. It has the desktop apps I use, and I like the keyboard better. Though that is probably my fault for not going for the better keyboard cover.

Tablet is just for when I'm out of the office/home, or to look something up or reply to e-mail real quick when I'm in the kitchen or living room, or to read books or news stories in bed. iPad works well as a giant smartphone (web and e-mail) because of a better screen and 3G/4G.

Surface? Well first of all, I need to find a wifi signal. Lame. Then the screen looks fine at laptop viewing distance (2-3 feet) but at tablet distance (1 foot or less) I can see individual pixels. Awful. It reminds me of the iPad 1 and 2 screen, which I also hated and couldn't wait to get rid of.

iOS or Win 8? It doesn't matter to me on a tablet doing tablety things. Surface Pro could be a tablet/laptop device for me though. Then it would matter and I'd rather have a Win32 OS instead of the Apple's walled garden OS/appstore approach. But we'll see about that in January.....

BTW I get these devices for free from work, or I would NOT have spent my money buying them every 6 months. Hell no. I'd just use a kickass laptop and a smartphone if my money were on the line.

Peter's complaints would make more sense if he could say he used the ASUS (which has the awesome features he thinks he wants) and could definitively say it was a much better experience. He comes off as complaining about checklist features. I'm not even convinced he's used the device enough to make these determinations. Maybe he has but he didn't really communicate how the missing features impacted him.

He says the biggest problem is the Surface falls short at being a tablet but doesn't explain how in any detail. He alludes to form factor and software but doesn't expand on what is wrong. He doesn't like tablets for web browsing or email. What does Peter even use a tablet for?

The screen would be better with higher resolution but it's not that bad and has very limited effect on usability.

Peter's complaints would make more sense if he could say he used the ASUS (which has the awesome features he thinks he wants) and could definitively say it was a much better experience. He comes off as complaining about checklist features. I'm not even convinced he's used the device enough to make these determinations. Maybe he has but he didn't really communicate how the missing features impacted him.

I've used it for as long as anyone outside of Microsoft has used it.

Or more to the point, I haven't used it, because it's a useless device. I've been in places where I want to use it, but the fact that it doesn't work on my lap, and doesn't have 3G, rendered it useless.

Quote:

He says the biggest problem is the Surface falls short at being a tablet but doesn't explain how in any detail. He alludes to form factor and software but doesn't expand on what is wrong. He doesn't like tablets for web browsing or email. What does Peter even use a tablet for?

The Surface? Nothing.

Quote:

The screen would be better with higher resolution but it's not that bad and has very limited effect on usability.

It may not be "that bad" but it's also "not that good". For $499, it should be a hell of a lot better. Look at the screen an iPad or a Nexus 10 gives you for $499.

ARS used to be intellectual and neutral. i had to stop the stream 5 mins in caz all i can hear is an apple fanboy whining about a windows tablet being different.

I don't own an iPad, I don't own an iPhone, I don't want either. I had high hopes for Surface, and it didn't meet any of them, other than build quality and industrial design. And as much as I like both things, I'm not going to use a device solely because it's attractive and well built; it has to be useful, too. Surface isn't.

Never mind the 7-inch screen, but it is quite clear that the Nexus 7 is not positioned as a content creation device. The caliber of apps in Android is horrible and tablet apps is Android's worst category. And despite promises from Microsoft, Office for Windows RT is actually worse than Apple's iWork suite on a tablet because it is not touch optimized. It is just the desktop interface with bigger icons.

Microsoft let the great touch-oriented developers that were working on Courier go their own way and as a result they brought apps like Paper by Fifty Three to market -- which has an amazing touch interface. Despite Microsoft's claim, the most productive tablet on the market whether you are preparing a presentation, crunching numbers in a spread sheet, taking notes, preparing a speech, putting together a home movie, editing photos, compiling a song, annotating a large PDF document, organizing your thoughts, making a quick sketch or creating a masterpiece is the iPad.

I cannot express how disappointed I am in what Microsoft produced for a touch-based version of MS Office. I have more confidence in Apple updating iWork under Jony Ives to rise to the challenge than I do in the incredibly experienced Microsoft of transforming their beast of an Office app into an efficient mobile application with a good touch screen experience.

ARS used to be intellectual and neutral. i had to stop the stream 5 mins in caz all i can hear is an apple fanboy whining about a windows tablet being different.

I don't own an iPad, I don't own an iPhone, I don't want either. I had high hopes for Surface, and it didn't meet any of them, other than build quality and industrial design. And as much as I like both things, I'm not going to use a device solely because it's attractive and well built; it has to be useful, too. Surface isn't.

I got the impression that you felt the Surface fell short of being a tablet but it doesn't sound like you even use tablets? How can you even make this determination? Or is there some other tablet that you do use?

ARS used to be intellectual and neutral. i had to stop the stream 5 mins in caz all i can hear is an apple fanboy whining about a windows tablet being different.

I don't own an iPad, I don't own an iPhone, I don't want either. I had high hopes for Surface, and it didn't meet any of them, other than build quality and industrial design. And as much as I like both things, I'm not going to use a device solely because it's attractive and well built; it has to be useful, too. Surface isn't.

Peter, do you use a tablet? As a business traveler the Surface has been a huge upgrade for me from the iPad, so your 'Surface isn't useful' caught me off guard. I can finally leave the MacBook at home on short trips.

I tried Surface yesterday in a local MS store, liked it very much, gonna get one next month as an xmas present for myself Screen is indeed very high contrast and brightness and almost no glare, just like they say in reviews. It's great for video, games and web/email, I didn't find it to be worse than iPad's for my purposes, but I don't read a lot of text in tiny fonts maybe that's why, also the ClearType antialiasing seems to take care of jaggies so overall felling is like it's same quality as iPad, perception wise you know.

Weight is the same as iPad so don't believe pro-Apple trolls who keep telling fairy tales about it being heavier. It is not, just look at spec sheet for the proof. Feels just as heavy/bulky as iPad in my hands. Free Office 2013 is a nice touch, I immediately fired up Word 2013 and tried to repeat that infamous trick some other pro-Apple troll posted online recently where he was typing very fast and Word could not catch up to his speed. Of course it also turned out to be another fairy tale from a typical pro-Apple zealot, 'cause in my test I typed really really fast for a minute (just hitting like from 6 to 8 random keys per second including space) and Word never skipped a bit, it was following me as fast as I was typing.

Keyboard covers are great, and it's true touch cover requires some training but type cover is excellent as is, definitely people who type a lot or prefer traditional keyboards should get type cover, it's perfect for a small tablet keyboard IMHO.

The interface is as slick, smooth and responsive as it gets, no surprises here. Totally expected after reviews.

Well, so my overall impression was very positive, a few pro-Apple troll myths were busted and now I'm going to get one for myself soon. However for my buddy who wants Win8 tablet for his quick book software I'm going to start looking into the Atom based Win8 tablets like the one from Lenovo. ARM with its x86 incompatibility is not gonna work for him and his x86 business software. Will work great for me and my family though, my 6yo son got addicted to Cut The Rope on Surface in a second, got to pull him off this thing literally

Did anyone try an Atom based Win8 tablet already? Please share your impressions. Is there a store chain in the US where I can drop by and play with it? Unfortunately MS stores do NOT stock such tablets on premises. No way to walk into an MS store and play with an Atom tablet with Win8.

ARS used to be intellectual and neutral. i had to stop the stream 5 mins in caz all i can hear is an apple fanboy whining about a windows tablet being different.

I don't own an iPad, I don't own an iPhone, I don't want either. I had high hopes for Surface, and it didn't meet any of them, other than build quality and industrial design. And as much as I like both things, I'm not going to use a device solely because it's attractive and well built; it has to be useful, too. Surface isn't.

Peter, do you use a tablet? As a business traveler the Surface has been a huge upgrade for me from the iPad, so your 'Surface isn't useful' caught me off guard. I can finally leave the MacBook at home on short trips.

I don't use a tablet because none of them offer a seamless migration to "more than a tablet" when I outgrow their needs. The great promise that Windows 8 has is that it can do this--it can give me casual screen swiping when I'm watching TV but also a full environment when I'm not. Windows 8 doesn't deliver this in a manner that's anything close to "perfect", but it comes a hell of a lot closer than anything else on the market. I truly want something that's more productive capable than an iPad. But Surface just doesn't deliver that.

The one work app that I absolutely must have is Outlook; Surface doesn't do that. It's a dealbreaker. That alone means I can't take Surface to conferences or press events or even Starbucks. DEAL. BREAKER. I don't care about Word or PowerPoint (read-only viewers would be sufficient for about 99% of what I do), I never use OneNote, and while I use Excel quite a bit, the lack of macroing means that I can't use it for everything.

Even if you ignore Outlook, the mere fact that I have to take my laptop somewhere just in case I need to do something Surface can't means that I might as well just not use Surface at all. Sure, taking Surface instead of a laptop would be lighter and easier, but taking a laptop and Surface is worse than taking a laptop alone.

No use case for NFC? There are already tons of use cases. Lots of scientific and engineering instruments have NFC, and NFC devices can directly read their data. So, for example, instead of going around sticking a meter into vats of fermenting wine to measure BRIX, then writing the numbers down on a clipboard, then going back to a desktop to type them in, a phone with NFC could use a tag to figure out what batch it's next to, then upload the number directly to a web app. There are TONS of applications like this.

Weight is the same as iPad so don't believe pro-Apple trolls who keep telling fairy tales about it being heavier. It is not, just look at spec sheet for the proof. Feels just as heavy/bulky as iPad in my hands. Free Office 2013 is a nice touch, I immediately fired up Word 2013 and tried to repeat that infamous trick some other pro-Apple troll posted online recently where he was typing very fast and Word could not catch up to his speed. Of course it also turned out to be another fairy tale from a typical pro-Apple zealot, 'cause in my test I typed really really fast for a minute (just hitting like from 6 to 8 random keys per second including space) and Word never skipped a bit, it was following me as fast as I was typing.

It isn't any such thing. It's just that the Office RT Preview, which Surface ships with, has performance issues in some situations. The free fix was in fact released before retail availability but it didn't automatically install on day one, so people didn't know it existed, or how to install it. I believe it's automatic now.

So what we can all take away from this is that Ars still hates Microsoft, and loves Apple and Google. Don't need a technicast to know that fact.

Peter bashed the shit out of a product that didn't do what he personally uses a laptop/tablet for. It is a totally subjective view based on how one man operates his device.

He says things like "I never use onenote". Great, what about all of the millions of people who do use onenote constantly? How can you explain the merits of onenote on surface or onenoteMX in the store, if you don't even use the product? You can't so you just write it off and consider it a neutral feature you can't quite bash, but can't provide any real insight on.

I went and tested out the surface at a pop-up MS store at the Eaton Centre, I was overall impressed but the lack of GPS, NFC and running x86 apps are deal-breakers for me. Maybe the Surface Pro specs will be upgraded before release to include more sensors? Not getting my hopes up.

Also I found myself trying to swipe the charms menu away and wishing I could bring up the keyboard by swiping up from the bottom of the screen, especially in the start screen for the universal search.

So what we can all take away from this is that Ars still hates Microsoft, and loves Apple and Google. Don't need a technicast to know that fact.

Peter bashed the shit out of a product that didn't do what he personally uses a laptop/tablet for. It is a totally subjective view based on how one man operates his device.

He says things like "I never use onenote". Great, what about all of the millions of people who do use onenote constantly? How can you explain the merits of onenote on surface or onenoteMX in the store, if you don't even use the product? You can't so you just write it off and consider it a neutral feature you can't quite bash, but can't provide any real insight on.

Strangely enough, I can't use every single application ever written, ever. Would you rather reviewers write about how a device fills their needs--something they know about--or do you want them to speculate about some hypothetical customer who has different needs that they have no way of accurately assessing? If so, feel free to ignore everything I ever write that's review-like, because I'm not going to do that.

Never mind the 7-inch screen, but it is quite clear that the Nexus 7 is not positioned as a content creation device. The caliber of apps in Android is horrible and tablet apps is Android's worst category. And despite promises from Microsoft, Office for Windows RT is actually worse than Apple's iWork suite on a tablet because it is not touch optimized. It is just the desktop interface with bigger icons.

Microsoft let the great touch-oriented developers that were working on Courier go their own way and as a result they brought apps like Paper by Fifty Three to market -- which has an amazing touch interface. Despite Microsoft's claim, the most productive tablet on the market whether you are preparing a presentation, crunching numbers in a spread sheet, taking notes, preparing a speech, putting together a home movie, editing photos, compiling a song, annotating a large PDF document, organizing your thoughts, making a quick sketch or creating a masterpiece is the iPad.

I cannot express how disappointed I am in what Microsoft produced for a touch-based version of MS Office. I have more confidence in Apple updating iWork under Jony Ives to rise to the challenge than I do in the incredibly experienced Microsoft of transforming their beast of an Office app into an efficient mobile application with a good touch screen experience.

A. Touch office actually works pretty much fine, based on my experience. I know Peter wrote that entire article about how it's unusable but that hasn't been my experience at all. Not saying he's wrong, more just anecdotal data on all sides.

B. They already released OneNote in a great touch-native format and I wouldn't be surprised to see them do so for Word or maybe even other apps in the future alongside the iOS/Android versions of Office.

C. One copy of real Word/Excel is worth more than all of the apps you listed for people in a serious work or school environment where they are expected to share documents.

Cesar Torres / Cesar is the Social Editor at Ars Technica. His areas of expertise are in online communities, human-computer interaction, usability, and e-reader technology. Cesar lives in New York City.